Now With 50 Major Retailers On Board, Coupons.com’s New iOS App Adds Passbook-Enabled Coupons

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A little over a month after the digital couponing giant Coupons.com began supporting Passbook-enabled coupons from its mobile website, the company is now adding support for the feature in its native iOS application. At the time of the original launch, 20 major retailers were offering discounts through these Passbook coupons, includin Macy’s, Old Navy, PETCO, Barnes & Noble, Jo-Anne Fabric, ULTA Beauty, Yankee Candle, Michaels, Sears, Sweet Tomatoes, PetSmart, and others. That number has now grown to 50.

Before, getting the coupons into the Apple Passbook app on your smartphone meant browsing to a mobile website (Coupons.com, which is mobile-optimized), then tapping a “Get Coupons” button underneath the “Passbook” section. From there, you could add individual coupons to your Passbook wallet by tapping each one’s “Add to Passbook” button.

The new integration, which actually rolled out yesterday as an app update, makes adding coupons to Passbook slightly easier. Instead of having to navigate through a mobile website, you’ll find all the Passbook coupons listed in the new “Offers” section of the updated app. Unfortunately, there’s no way to multi-select offers and add them all to Passbook at once – you still have to do it one-by-one.

That’s more of a technical limitation, though, as Apple seems to not have considered the possibilities as to how serious coupon clippers would adopt Passbook technology. In previous tests with Coupons.com’s Passbook coupons, for example, I found it tedious to have to discard unused coupons after expiration. The cutesy “card shredding” animation is fun at first, but a dozen coupons in, and you’re silently screaming “oh, just delete already!”

As before, the Passbook coupons include the retailer’s name, offer description (“Save 20%”), expiration date and scannable barcode. For registers where barcode scanners don’t work or aren’t present, a numeric code (and instructions for cashiers – hooray!) is provided.

With the updated app, Coupons.com has also expanded its retailer lineup, with now around 50 big-name retailers on board, including the above list, as well as new additions Best Buy, Coach, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Hallmark, Home Depot, JCP, Nordstrom, Office Depot and West Elm. New retailers will be added frequently, the company adds.